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Contract Law Teaching, US-style »

Apparently Ben Davis of the University of Toledo law school really gets into the facts of Hadley v. Baxendale, acting out the various parts for his students. (Who, of course, have taped his performance and posted it to Google Videos.) For the non-contracts geeks in the audience, Hadley is a famous case on the recoverability of consequential damages for breach of contract. The facts had to do with late delivery of a replacement mill shaft, and the mill owner’s claim for lost profits. Here is professor Davis, complete with mill shaft…

I am still trying to decide if this is a case of creative pedagogy, or a cautionary tale about students, cameras, and Google…

Hadley v Baxendale[1854] EWHC Exch J70, (1854) 9 Exch 341, 156 ER 145 (23 February 1854) has its own wikipedia entry, which points to this picture of the mill as it is now, and to this historical background to the case; and here’s a contemporary advertisment for Pickfords, the carriers who lost the shaft (more on them in this context here and here – indeed, they’re still around). Here’s a short bio of Baron Alderson, the judge who decided the case and wrote the famous judgment. It is an important case, which has drawn analysis from each major field of legal scholarship (eg Adler, Bebchuck & Shavell, Geis, and Posner; all from SSRN; also Danzig 4 (2) J Leg Stud 249 (1975); Eisenberg 80 (3) Calif L Rev 563 (1992); and Landa 16 (2) J Leg Stud 455 (1987)), and formed the basis of the relatively recent decision of the House of Lords in Jackson v Royal Bank of Scotland[2005] UKHL 3 (27 January 2005) which I am sure will feature strongly at Ralph Cunnington‘s forthcoming conference on Contract Damages at the end of next month in the University of Birmingham.

Not sure I could carry off the one act play, though.

Bonus. Movers are movers, whenever they move things:

Pride of man who dropped Â£26,000 grand piano wounded

Brian Haigh was back at work yesterday, once again bringing all of his 25 years of experience to bear on the job of moving pianos. But, after a sorry incident at the weekend, he was the first to admit that his pride had been badly dented by the moment when he and two colleagues managed to drop a Â£26,000 Bosendorfer grand piano which the organisers of a festival had spent two years saving up to buy. (Read more, Daily Telegraph, 12/04/2007).

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What I'd like for here is a simple widget that takes the list of feeds from my existing RSS reader and displays it here as a blogroll. Nothing fancy. I'd love a recommendation, if you have one.

I had built a blogroll here on my Google Reader RSS subscriptions. Google Reader produced a line of html for each RSS subscription category, each of which I pasted here. So I had a list of my subscriptions as my blogroll, organised by category, which updated whenever I edited Google Reader. Easy peasy. However, with the sad and unnecessary demise of that product, so also went this blogroll. Please take a moment to mourn Google Reader. If there's an RSS reader which provides a line of html for the list of subscriptions, or for each RSS subscription category as Google Reader did, I'd happily use that. So, as I've already begged, I'd love a recommendation, if you have one.

Meanwhile, please bear with me until I find a new RSS+Blogroll solution